Moving right along

It’s been a little while since I’ve written in this, and that is possibly due to the fact that I left myself internet-less for a while, not realizing that the fixed line I have been using is not set up to work with Windows 7 that I have on the new netbook. That will be fixed by buying an internet key which works in a similar way but doesn’t need to be charged the way a regular fixed line does, and it is a bit more expensive. At any rate, I’m typing this offline to be uploaded in Toubacouta tomorrow when I go help out some friends with terracing a garden. It’ll be a long day.

On the homefront, things have started to happen at site! After starting my demonstration plot and planting my moringa intensive bed, my friend Byron came to visit me for a day and helped me get all my project ideas into a real schedule. It is amazing how much better it can make you feel when you actually have a purpose in life. During his visit, we went to the fields to look at some of the work I’ve done already and determine logistics on things such as how many seeds I will need for live fences, where I can obtain them and when I should be starting them. By this point, I have a pretty good idea of what my life is going to be like up until the next rainy season when the pepiniering season comes to a close and outplanting begins. If that is jibberish to you, that means that we have to first seed the trees, let them grow a little bit in tree sacks where there is greater soil retention and less risk of insect attack, then we take the seedlings and plant them in the ground to their final site right after the rains begin and they will be watered around June or July.

The other great thing about visitors is the food. Senegalese love to impress their visitors, so the quality of the food is substantially greater if somebody comes to say hi. Unfortunately for me, I live out in the middle of nowhere and it is difficult for most volunteers to stop by, but when they do it is a good day for me and my stomach. For dinner, they cooked chicken with a macaroni sauce- a huge treat, and for the following lunch we had a rice dish with onions, carrots and fish called yassa. Yummy.

Since Byron’s visit, I have started to have more of a direction to my daily schedule, which is reinforced by my farmer counterparts in the village. We talked to a farmer named Abdou Aziz about planting bananas, for instance, since he has abundant water sources in his field and plenty of overgrown space that can be cleared and used. We also talked briefly about the uses of Neeme, a common tree in Senegal that has insect-repellant properties and can be used both in the field as a preventative pesticide and on the body as a regular bug spray. Today, when I got back to his field, he had already gone to a neighboring village to obtain some banana plants that we can plant, and he had attempted to make a neeme solution for his garden. Unless you are a volunteer, it is hard to describe just how amazing it is that a farmer simply took you at your word without seeing it in practice and went ahead and tried it. The small victories can really make your day.

Now all of a sudden, January is almost over, and soon I will be traveling to Thies for the agroforestry summit and Gender Awareness and Development seminar. Afterwards, we get to go to Dakar for WAIST, the West African Invitational Softball Tournament. It will be a welcome break from the village for a week or so, and hopefully I will come back rejuvenated and ready to get some of these pepinieres up and running. One can always hope.

Missing home lots.

~E.

Gardening a happy new year

I started another garden today. Things that I learned as a little kid are really starting to be enforced- if at first you fail, try, try again. In this case, it applies both to the demise of my garden behind my hut and to the minor failure at teaching soil amendments the other day. Before I went to Sokone for language seminar, I went out to the field with the women in the village who were starting their plots. They were digging, and I decided that it was time to take initiative and try to explain soil amendments and their benefits before they get everything planted. I tried to speak up, and some of them clearly had no idea what I was saying, so it turned into a random mess of some women trying to throw green leaves into a pile to just mix into the soil at random. My uncle came over to me and said some people didn’t want to do that because it was extra work, and I tried to show that it really wasn’t that hard to strip some leaves from some trees and put them into the ground. In an awkward turn of events, somebody then got a phone call that someone in the village had died and everyone had to go home. The plots still haven’t been finished. Now, however, I am learning from my mistakes and I am making some big compost piles for myself, pepiniering in an area where there’s water and good soil, and in a public location where it will be easy to teach and discuss with people. This doesn’t mean I won’t retry planting in my backyard- it’s really convenient when I don’t feel like leaving my hut to just say I have work to do in my garden here. It’s also probably the most control I have over any one location since it is protected from goats and locked away from little annoying children. A public garden space has its benefits though- it’s close to outplanting sites if I want to pepiniere some live fencing species for the women’s garden next to it, and it’s next to the women’s plots that they had started so they will have to walk by my garden every time they go to work there and see my moringa beds I plan to plant- free advertisement of the fact that it is, in fact, important for them. At least that’s how it works in my mind.

Speaking of moringa, I will be traveling into Kaolack for a moringa tourney meeting in a couple of days, and this being after I just got back from my language seminar in Sokone. It is amazing that now that the 5-week challenge is over, I really am out of site a lot. Thankfully my counterpart/dad Ousman understands; I applogized that I had to travel so much the other day and he was perfectly ok with it, explaining that he knew I was learning and the village would ultimately be able to benefit from it. I can’t claim to love spending as much time as possible in the village, but traveling so much takes its toll on you when you are trying to form relationships with people and when it’s a minimum of waking up at 4 am and traveling on an overcrowded bush taxi for 4 hours just to get into the regional house. I justify it by thinking that I will have some bragging rights among other, less-remote volunteers later on. That, or I’ll just start complaining all the time.

On a completely different note, did anyone make New Year’s resolutions? Mine is to make it through the year. This year is bound to change me in ways I can’t even imagine and present challenges that may be harder than anything I’ve ever had to face, so wish me luck. Here goes, 2011.

~E